Persons who perform a significant percentage of their work within their homes may do so for a number of different reasons. For example, a self-employed individual may establish a home office from which all business is conducted. For some businesses, a standard telephone line for incoming and outgoing calls sufficiently enables the necessary communication for the business. However, other forms of business require high-speed and bandwidth-intensive connectivity to a sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure in order to operate efficiently.
In comparison to independent persons who operate solely out of a home, a "telecommuter" will be defined herein as a person who operates within a business-sponsored arrangement that allows an employee to work at home, either on a full-time basis or a split-time basis. There are a number of inventions related to enhancing the efficiency of work-at-home employees. U.S. Pat. No. 5,459,780 to Sand describes an arrangement for providing automatic call distribution (ACD) service for a mixture of at-office ACD agents and at-home ACD agents. Incoming calls are received at a host switch of a distributor that distributes calls to the various agents. An at-home agent may then be contacted via a home switch. The Sand patent describes the station of the agent as being an "intelligent" station, i.e. one that includes a computer or the like. An intelligent workstation receives voice signals from the home switch and transmits and receives data messages over a link that terminates at a home agent server (HAS). The data link carries event messages, such as answer and disconnect, and carries application messages, such as data related to an order placed by the caller. The HAS transmits the applications data to a host processor that may be used to accept order data. The HAS also passes call event data to a management information system, which may be used by supervisors to track the individual work performances of agents and to maintain data relating to the number of calls and the waiting time of calls.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,291,551 to Conn et al. describes a home agent telecommunications technique. When a potential purchaser of a particular product directs a telephone call to a transaction-processing center, the call is re-routed. The call is received at a local exchange carrier (LEC) central office. The call is identified at an exchange of a public switched telephone network to determine the identity of an at-home agent who is designated to receive the customer-initiated call. The call is then routed to an LEC central office that serves the designated at-home agent. From the second LEC central office, the call is directed to the at-home agent across a combined voice and data communications channel, so that a voice link between the customer and the agent is completed. Once the voice link with the customer is initiated, the at-home agent then communicates data across the channel to the transaction-processing center.
While the Sand and Conn et al. inventions provide improvements in connecting an at-home agent to the telecommunications infrastructure of a main office, further improvements are needed, particularly for persons who maintain both an office telecommunications station and a home telecommunications station.
What is needed is a system and method that facilitate maintenance of "duplicate" on-site and off-site telecommunications stations, with a sensitivity to privacy and productivity issues. Further, what is needed is a method that provides station-to-station compatibility with respect to user access.